About Clarence Pickett

Clarence E. Pickett

1884-1965

Executive Secretary
American Friends Service Committee
1929-1950

On the night of April 29, 1962, the White
House was the scene of a glittering gathering, described by the
press as possibly establishing a new high in concentrated
American brainpower. The President and Mrs. Kennedy received all
past Nobel Prizewinners from the United States and Canada. That
morning a group of Quakers had walked silently before the White
House to draw the President's attention to the urgency of ending
the nuclear arms race. Among the marchers was a frail
seventy-seven-year-old man, Clarence E. Pickett. The same
evening, in white tie and tails, he and his wife, Lilly, appeared
at the White House gate as invited guests representing the
American Friends Service Committee. The President enjoyed both
the humor and the wider significance of having the White House
"Picketted" from the outside and from within on the
same day.

The Incident tells volumes about an
extraordinary guest as well as about a perceptive host. And it
tells something about a nation that can appreciate such
goings-on. Clarence Pickett was no newcomer to the White House.
Three previous occupants had invited him, one frequently.
Herbert Hoover sought his advice on the plight of distressed coal-mining
communities. Franklin Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor, consulted
him on such diverse questions as subsistence homesteads,
spiriting harasses Jews out of Nazi Germany, relief of devastated
Europe and Asia, finding a teacher for the Crown Prince of Japan.
Harry Truman selected him to help devise more humane immigration
policies. John F. Kennedy appointed him advisor to the Peace
Corps. Mrs. Roosevelt, who allotted to AFSC her earnings from
broadcasts, said in 1958, "I always try to do the things
Clarence asks because I have great trust in his judgment."

He never traveled in government circles
by choice. He was there only in the interest of his clients, the
little people of the world. In high places and low he represented
the oppressed, the persecuted, the disadvantaged, the underdog of
every color, race, religion, and nation. His concern for humanity
came naturally. His pious Quaker mother had to purge herself of
some initial resentment at his arrival as her ninth child when
she was forty-three. She took consolation in the hope that he
might become "a devoted, useful member of the Kingdom of
Heaven on earth." Thousands influenced by him testify to the
ample realization of a mother's dream. Educated at Penn College,
Iowa, Hartford Theological Seminary, and Harvard, he served as a
Quaker minister in Toronto and Oskaloosa, as national secretary
of Young Friends' activities, and as professor of biblical
literature at Earlham College. From 1929 until partial retirement
in 1950, he was executive secretary of the American Friends
Service Committee.

This small, religiously motivated
organization had an annual budget of $55,000 in 1929. Under his
leadership and that of his successors, its budget has grown to
more than $5,000,000. Despite his and their conscientious
abhorrence of corporate bigness, its program is now worldwide.
AFSC provided the principal channel-though by no means the only
one-whereby Clarence Pickett sought to achieve the Kingdom of God
on earth. His means were varied. Even when exceedingly practical,
they were never mundane. Mediation of labor-management disputes,
subsistence housing and cooperative farming for miners, economic
assistance to Negro slum-dwellers and war-displaced
Japanese-Americans, more humane police practices in Philadelphia,
and relief for Jewish, Arab, and other refugees were just a few
of his good works. But he also gave steadily increasing priority
to removal of the causes of man's suffering. His only enemies
were human hatred and misunderstanding, willingness to wage war,
hesitancy to wage peace, inadequate structures for resolving
differences among nations.

Counseling with Quaker students during
World War I on how they might best serve humanity in crisis
helped him and them to a concept of Christian pacifism
transcending mere rejection of war participation. A vision
emerged of a time when war would not longer be an instrument of
national policy, and of promising steps to bring that time
nearer. It distressed him that post-World War II society forgot
so quickly the lessons of the war, and reverted so often to
mindless force in resolving international disputes. But he never
lost hope.

His later years left him freer to pursue
fundamental goals. Strengthening the United Nations was a
cherished aspiration. To this end he developed the Quaker Program
at the U.N. A prominent Moslem diplomat told the General Assembly
of Clarence's major role in creating the first U.N. Meditation
Room, and of its practical benefit to Moslem members who had
previously resorted to telephone booths for repeating their
prayers.

Always alert to reducing East-West
tensions, he and AFSC decided to create a special emergency fund
for shipment of urgently needed streptomycin to the Soviet Union.
He viewed disarmament as fundamental to reduction of tensions
leading to war. He was co-chairman of the Committee for a Sane
Nuclear Policy.

Clarence Pickett's zeal for peace made of
him a highly controversial figure, sometimes eliciting vitriolic
attacks from the extreme right, ludicrously incongruous charges
to all who knew him. Called a radical for his opposition to war,
for espousal of the rights of minorities, for his doubts about
the House Un-American Activities Committee, for efforts to
improve U.S.-Soviet relations, he found that such allegations
rarely came from those who had met him face to face. For to know
him was to respect him, and often to become infected with his
enthusiasms.

Many marveled at his gift for bringing
out the best in colleagues and even in casual acquaintances.
Doors that were closed to most "unofficials" in
Washington, New York, and the great capitals swung open freely to
him. Minds also swung open and, more important, so did hearts.
Many of the world's great beat a path to his door, a small house
on the campus of Haverford College where the Picketts spent their
last decade and a half. His visitors were by no means all
distinguished. They included precisely the little people on whose
behalf the great also come. Even doors of capitals hard to
penetrate sometimes opened to his knock and that of AFSC. This
was especially true of those behind the so-called Iron Curtain.
To his great disappointment, one exception was Peking. But he
never gave up hope of improved relations with China.

The war in Vietnam saddened him not only
as a dreadful human tragedy but as a breakdown of morality, a
reversion on both sides to primitive methods that have always
failed in the past. The last message written before he died on
March 17, 1965, read: "The struggle in Vietnam is futile. It
will not really defeat the appeal of Communism; also it
jeopardizes the good name of the United States and sacrifices
good American and Asian lives. Statesmanship by America calls for
a commanding gesture for negotiation and a facing of the real
problem of Vietnam-poverty, insecurity, and defeat. I urge a
prompt turn in the direction of peace."

Recipient of scores of honors, awards,
honorary degrees, board member of foundations and institutions,
friend of world leaders, Clarence Pickett never lost humility. He
constantly reminded himself that the truly prophetic voice must
be so critical of its own world and times that praise becomes a
source of worry, not satisfaction.

His response to the announcement of the
award to AFSC and its British counterpart of the 1947 Nobel Peace
Prize was characteristic. Facing his elated staff for the first
time after the news arrived, he suggested a period of silent
worship for each to ponder the thought "Beware when all men
speak well of you!"

An essay by Harold
E. Snyder. Taken from Clarence Pickett—A Memoir, compiled and
edited by Walter Kohoc, 1966.

A biography
written by Lawrence Mck. Miller and published by Pendle Hill
Publications, Witness for Humanity
(1999), gives wonderful insight into the character and work of
Clarence Pickett.

For additional information about Clarence
Pickett see: For More Than Bread an
autobiographical account of twenty-two years' work with the
American Friends Service Committee. Boston: Little/Brown, 1953.